NEW: Rare Earths and Rare Tech Podcast. Podcast #1: Canada's Rare Earth Future

 

I am launching a new podcast today, the Rare Earths and Rare Tech Podcast, which will cover 'Rare Earths' as the material sources of our digital and virtual evolution. The 'Rare Tech' in the title covers topics such as AI, robotics, cryptos, blockchains, and Web 3, among others.

Note that for the sake of time and my sanity, there will be two types of  episodes. The first type will be BACKGROUNDERS, which will be AI-researched, written, and generated. These are meant to be quick overviews and summaries to give the listener a basic grasp of the topic. They are not exhaustively correct and you should always do your own research.

The second type of episode will be human-created by me - researched, written and presented. These episodes, labeled as HIGHLIGHTS, will offer the kind of analysis I have presented here at Histories of Things to Come, by contextualizing 21st century technological innovation in historical terms.

Source essays, whether AI-generated or written by me, will be provided exclusively to Patreon subscribers. You can support me at Patreon here.

The first episode, Canada's Rare Earth Future, is an AI-generated Backgrounder on why President Donald Trump may wish to annex Canada. It provides a snapshot of the rare earths sector in Canada.

Relevant to the podcast is a clip from today's telegram newsfeed: "The CTO of Palantir says that the United States 'is at war with China' and that 'the time to mobilize has come.'"

Source: https://t.me/GeneralMCNews/12250.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/deepseek-ai-us-ban-prison-b2692396.html.

Time Lapses: Godfather of the Selfie

 

Noah Kalina Reflects on 25 Years of Everyday 10 January 2000 - 10 January 2025: Artist Noah Kalina is back with a reflective commentary on his Everyday project, about which I have previously blogged here and here. Famous for photographing himself every day for the past 25 years, Kalina is not making a 25-year video for the project. His most recent summary was posted for the 20-year point.

See all my posts about Noah Kalina's Everyday project.

Im Abendrot: Farewell to David Lynch (1946-2025)

I don't have words now to express how sad I am that David Lynch died today, 16 January 2025. Three decades ago, I re-watched Blue Velvet with a roommate who had never seen it. After it ended, she said, "Now I know why when we saw that paper bag by the sidewalk last week, you told me, 'Don't look inside it. And don't touch it.'" With unforgettable imagery, direction, actors, music, and scripts, Lynch found grandeur, mystery and horror in the mundane. I learned how to cook quinoa from watching an extra on the Inland Empire DVD.

Several classic lines pop up in my head:

• If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness ...
• You'll never have me.
• I am not an animal! I am a human being!
  
• You're here to make Mr. Reindeer happy.
• Where's my hairbrush? Go get my lipstick.
  
• Damn, this sounds like dialogue from our script!
• I just came here from Deep River, Ontario.
  
• The worst part of being old is rememberin' when you was young.
  
• A beginning is a very delicate time. 
• I just know, that's all.  

Lynch had a great influence on my literary work and I'll write more about this shortly on my writer's blog, The Dragonfly.

If I could pick one scene which transformed a fragment of everyday reality into mythic horror, it would be "Gotta light?" from the second Twin Peaks series.

 

Image Source: Etsy.

See all my posts on David Lynch.

Solar System Space Opera

Happy New Year! My podcast, A New Mythology for the New Millennium, continues with my Solar System Space Opera. 

Listen to the whole podcast

I wrote the prompts for the opera, but the music is Suno AI-generated. Suno is very pop-oriented and it was interesting to see how it could be pushed to produced more nuanced music. This project explores how AI prompts and music offer a new way of presenting themes in my writing. 

Over at my other blog, The Dragonfly, I will follow up later in January 2025 with a podcast on the mythological or occulted history of the solar system and how it fits with my Dark Matter literary symbolism.

Here at Histories of Things to Come, I will begin to discuss the positives and negatives of AI tools as they rapidly evolve. The recent video below raises serious concerns, namely, that AI will be fantastic until the moment when it suddenly turns on us. I think AI development has been affecting our society for decades already, and until we grapple with that fact, we won't see how close to the edge we actually are.

New Post at The Dragonfly: Narrative Conventions of the Seasons

I have a new post up at The Dragonfly:

Narrative Conventions of the Seasons

This post concerns my development of a children's book series about wildlife in my locality. The series includes four books about the seasons. My research for these books revealed that we use narrative conventions differently, depending on which season we are describing. For example, stories about winter have a different view of time than spring tales do.